Lawmakers efforts to free up state money for sober homeless housing has been thwarted for a second year in a row, after Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that had failed to his desk with few no votes.

Assembly Bill 255 would have allowed cities and counties to spend up to 10% of their state funding on recovery housing, where people live in a sober environment and work on overcoming an addiction.

The move would have tweaked California's Housing First strategy, which generally frowns on programs that put up barriers to housing, such as requiring people to stay clean or participate in treatment.

The bill's author, assembly member Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, said he was disappointed by Newsom's veto.

The governor said the bill was unnecessary and would have created a duplicative and costly new statutory category for recovery housing.

Recent guidance already allows cities and counties to spend state homelessness funds on sober housing.

Newsom said in his veto message for AB 255, Newsom said any future changes to the state's recovery housing policy should be considered through the annual budget process.

Haney's bill would have set up a new state system for the state's housing department to regulate recovery housing, which would have cost an estimated 4.12 million in the first year, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee's analysis.

Recovery programs would have paid a fee for state certification, but those fees likely amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, would not entirely offset the state's costs, the analysis said.

Since 2016, California has required housing providers to adopt a Housing First model, which emphasizes getting people into housing even if they are addicted to drugs or alcohol or struggling with a mental illness.

Instead of requiring people to participate in treatment programs as a condition of getting housing.

For CalMatters I'm Marisa Kendall